Enterprise information portal

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What is an Enterprise information portal? Enterprise Information Portals are one of the most popular ways in which enterprises can allow their employees and customers to search and access corporate information. It is a single gateway for users, such as employees, customers and company’s partners to log into and retrieve corporate information, company history and other services or resources.

Sources of Enterprise Information Portal

An enterprise information portal, also referred as an enterprise portal, is a web portal for use within an organization. Enterprise information portals are typically secure and private. In the early 2000s, a major industry shift in web portal focus has been the corporate intranet portal, or "enterprise web". Uniting the web communications and thinking inside a large corporation has begun to be seen by many as both a labor-saving and a money-saving technology. In 1998 Merrill Lynch analysts predicted that enterprise information portal spending would soon overtake the enterprise resource planning market.^[1]

Some features of enterprise portals are:

Content and document management — services that support the full life cycle of content and document creation and provide mechanisms for authoring, approval, version control and scheduled publishing. Some portal solutions providers aim to remove the need for a third-party content management system.
Collaboration — portal members can communicate synchronously (through chat or messaging) or asynchronously through threaded discussion and email digests (forums) and blogs.
Search & Navigation — Content is meant to be read, so on the usage side of the equation, being able to find and retrieve targeted content is the essential task. As more content is added to repositories, the more valuable those repositories become. Unfortunately, retrieving useful information becomes more difficult as the volume of information grows unless effective search and navigation methods are employed.
Personalization — the ability for portal members to subscribe to specific types of content and services. Users can customize the look and feel of their environment.Customers who are using EIPs can edit and design their own web sites which are full of their own personality and own style; they can also choose the specific content and services they prefer. Like My Yahoo. MSN.

Entitlement — the ability for portal administrators to limit specific types of content and services users have access to. For example, a company's proprietary information can be entitled for only company employee access.
Integration — the connection of functions and data from multiple systems into new components/portlets.
Single sign-on (SSO) — many enterprise portals provide single sign-on capabilities between their users and various other systems. This requires a user to authenticate only once. Access control lists manage the mapping between portal content and services over the portal user base.

Although this characterization has become less common, enterprise portals may be referred to by the community they serve. For instance, an employee-facing portal may be described as a business-to-employee electronic commerce (B2E) portal. Other enterprise portal classifications are business-to-consumer (B2C), business-to-dealer/distributor (B2D), business-to-business (B2B), and business-to-government (B2G). Enterprises may develop multiple B2x portals based on business structure and strategic focus, but leverage a common architectural framework, reusable component libraries, and standardized project methodologies.

There are some challenges for introducing EIPs

High cost: To maintain several Web and portal sites for employees, customers and partners is an expensive process, companies can spend a huge amount of money on an EIP system in the hope that it will provide a stable portal for them.
Conflict: To keep the current infrastructures or introduce more advanced system? Many businesses required a single, integrated Web environment to cover all the information and applications that is easy for employees, partners and customers to view and find information. However, no company would like to spend huge cost on replacing their existing infrastructures.
outmoded platform: Many companies used to have an outmoded development platform. Also they pay unequal attention on their information system. Especially for external, customers or employees can not find enough information or applications that they wanted. Therefore, the company may lose lots of chances to attract potential customers.
Ignoring Importance of Information Systems: An information repository is one of the basic requirements for a company to keep providing information to employees, partners or customers which they wish to view as web pages over their intranet. In contrast, a portal that does not contain all pertinent information resources can decrease a company’s market share and competitive advantage.

Why Enterprise information portals?

Centralization: EIPs provide a centralised system that may contain a wide range of a company’s corporate information and access to online applications. This centralised information system enables customers or employees to easily access information such as reports, application forms or policy documents. Furthermore, it is easy for the individuals within the company to update or edit content.
Increase productivity and profit: information and time is money. A Centralied and well organized information system provided by EIP can help employees get quick response and information that increase employees’ productivity. In addition, it can offer customers easy access to resources that may increase the company’s sources of customers.
Provide security area: EIP has one significant feature which is providing a security area that for team or a specific partner to access, which means only authorised users can access restriction information.